10 more reasons why email marketing should be a major part of your marketing strategy

Rather than bombard you with 20 tips at once, I thought it would be best to separate the reasons up. So here are the second 10…

1. A big mailing is an incentive for other companies to partner with you

If email marketing is a big part of your marketing plan then you’ll be actively collecting email addresses. If you’re actively collecting email addresses, it won’t take long to accumulate a lot of them. Once you’ve got in the tens of thousands, it’s an incentive for other companies to partner with you.

2. You can have themed emails

If the 4th of July is approaching and you’ve a lot of tours or activities in USA, you can have a running theme in an email that supports this. This can contain content, product…whatever you want. You can do something similar in social media, but not all in one go.

3. AB (or ‘Split’) testing

Just because you think you’ve come up with the subject line of the century, it doesn’t mean your audience will. Similarly, if you think a product panel should go above a content one in a newsletter, your audience might not engage with this. The only way to find out what works best is by AB/Split testing. Here’s how it works in the scenario of testing a subject line:

With a mailing list of 10,000, you split the first 1,000 two groups of 500

You then get two subject lines for the one campaign

You send the first group (A) one subject line, and the second group (B) the other

From those two ‘sendouts’ you see which one performs the best

You send the remaining 9,000 the winning email

This is a great way to discover what content people engage with the most and email is a great place to use this testing.

4. You can use the same piece of content twice in a very short space of time

If you share a piece of content on Facebook to your 10,000 fans, you can’t share the same piece of content again three days later to the fans who didn’t see the post. You can do this with most ESPs (Email Service Providers) by sending the same email to ‘non-openers’. This means you’ve got double the chance of reaching your customers with your email.

5. ‘Sponsored emails’ can be another revenue stream

If you’ve a mailing list of 50,000 email addresses but you don’t want to officially partner with another company, you can have a ‘sponsored email’ instead. This way it’s your email list, your banner but somebody else’s message… and your pay check.

6. People prefer email to social media

A survey carried out by Exact Target in 2013 found that consumers prefer to be communicated to via email than social media. The study also showed that more consumers had made a purchase as a direct result of receiving an email than from engagement with social media or deal sites.

7. Email is that little bit more private

We live in a world where, thanks to social media, customers can get in touch very quickly, but also very publicly, and some people don’t like that. But when you send a marketing email to your customers, once you’re monitoring the responses, you give your customers the opportunity to get in touch with you on a one-on-one basis.

8. It’s great for generating customer feedback

If you post a link on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn to a survey and ask customers for their feedback, you’ll get some response but not a lot. Instead, if you send out an email blast with ‘We want just 30 seconds of your time’ you’ll see that the response is much higher.

9. Email is regular… but not too regular

Most businesses post something on Facebook once a day. Some a lot more, some a lot less. But once a day is a fair average. As a result, when a potential customers sees you appear in their feed they may not take as much notice as when your business pops into their inbox. So while it’s great to appear in a Facebook feed once a day, it can be more powerful to appear in an inbox once a month.

10. It’s easy and, in some cases, free

There are lots of user-friendly ESPs (Email Service Providers) out there. These include CakeMail, MailChimp, Aweber, Constant Contact are just some of them. Of the two I’ve used, they’re user-friendly and should be manageable by even the biggest technophobes.

If you want to find out how your business can benefit from online booking software, get in touch:

Colm is Founder and Managing Director of digital marketing agency Sixtwo Digital. After running Hostelworld.com’s content and social media for almost 11 years he felt it was time to branch out on his own, using all his experience to educate others in the travel space.

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